All Resources

Journal Article

Leaves: Nature’s Solar Collectors

One of the most captivating things about plants is the way they capture the Sun’s energy, but this can be a difficult topic to cover with elementary students. Therefore, to help students to make a concrete connection to this abstract concept, this ...

Journal Article

Perspectives: Thinking About Thinking in Science Class

Self-regulated learners are able to set learning goals, find strategies that help them achieve those goals, and monitor their progress (Schraw, Crippen, and Hartley 2006). An important part of self-regulation is thinking about thinking, or metacognit...

Journal Article

Tried and True: Thinking spatially—taking observation, classification, and communication skills to a higher level of reasoning

When students classify, they embark on observing and identifying the properties of the object, and then they categorize, sort, group, organize, arrange, or grade objects into smaller and similar clusters or divisions. Therefore, observing and classif...

Journal Article

Rev Your Engines!

As part of the “Car Lab Project,” students constructed rubber band cars, raced them, and worked through a number of automotive activities. The students engaged in this project certainly had fun, but they also used high-tech gear such as motion se...

Journal Article

Health Wise—February 2009

With the increasing popularity of energy drinks, I wonder—are these drinks safe? How do they affect teens? ...

Journal Article

Safer Science: The Safety Legal Paper Trail

To avoid the potential for litigation, teachers need to be informed. They must know how to prevent accidents and should be proactive to protect both themselves and students from harm in the classroom. The following actions are recommended to help tea...

Journal Article

Honeybees, Butterflies, and Ladybugs: Partners to Plants

Honeybees, butterflies, and ladybugs all have fascinating mutually beneficial relationships with plants and play important ecosystem roles. Children also love these creatures. But how do we teach children about these symbiotic interactions and help t...

Journal Article

Inductive and Deductive Science Thinking: A Model for Lesson Development

Middle school students make great learning gains when they participate in lessons that invite them to practice their developing scientific reasoning skills; however, designing developmentally appropriate, clear, and structured lessons about scientifi...

Journal Article

Every Day Science: February 2009

This monthly feature contains facts and challenges for the science explorer. ...

Journal Article

Thinking, Teaching, and Learning Science Outside the Boxes

In both universities and K–12 schools, students leave one world and enter another as they attend classes in discipline-specific domains. But how can students gain the experiences necessary to make discoveries—for personal satisfaction, for academ...

Journal Article

Career of the Month: An Interview With Pharmacist Ken Thai

Medications prescribed by your doctor are designed to support your health. But if incorrectly prescribed, misused, or abused, these prescriptions can become dangerous and sometimes fatal. A pharmacist’s job is to ensure that your medications and do...

Journal Article

Teaching Through Trade Books: Secrets of Seeds

From a tiny radish seed to a giant coconut, seeds come in a multitude of shapes and sizes. They all share one amazing secret: the potential to grow into a new plant when conditions are right. In this month’s column, students observe a variety of se...

Journal Article

Scope on the Skies: The new Milky Way galaxy

When students are asked about the Milky Way galaxy and where our solar system is located, most will describe it as a spiral-shaped galaxy with the Sun located on one of the spiral arms. While this is essentially correct, data obtained with the Spitze...

Journal Article

Issues In-Depth: Advancing understanding of drug addiction and treatment

While most school districts utilize a drug abuse resistance curriculum, as science teachers, it is our responsibility to understand the science behind drug addiction in order to most effectively educate our students against drug abuse. In the last tw...

Journal Article

What’s So Big About Being Small?

An interdisciplinary approach to teaching involves leveraging the different perspectives of each discipline to better understand an issue or problem. The most ideal topics for interdisciplinary study are those whose very nature is also interdiscipli...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Dr. Vermeij and The Cay

As an interdisciplinary exploration, middle-level students were reading The Cay (1969) by Theodore Taylor in their English classes, honing map skills in social studies, and learning the importance of making observations in science class. Then, inspir...

Journal Article

Science Conversations for Young Learners

What do you get when you add 20 kindergarten students and a student-led science discussion for the first time? Mass chaos! So, after taking some time to recover, the authors began to reflect on what they could change to help orchestrate quality scien...

Journal Article

Creating a Schoolyard Mini-Garden

The creation of schoolyard gardens is a growing movement in the United States and around the world (Ballard, Tong, and Usher 1998; Pope 1998; Lewis 2004). It brings together all of the features of authentic hands-on science: Students can collect data...

Journal Article

The Interdisciplinary Study of Biofuels

From media news coverage to fluctuating gas prices, the topic of energy is hard to ignore. However, little connection often exists between energy use in our daily lives and the presentation of energy-related concepts in the science classroom. The con...

Journal Article

Editor’s Note: Plants and Their Partners

Plants are a ubiquitous piece of the elementary science curriculum. By the time they reach middle school, students have often grown enough bean seeds to feed a small city. Often these lessons don’t “grow” deeper ideas from the basic observation...

Journal Article

Instant Integration: Just Add Water

An instructional unit incorporating some of the Global Learning and Observation to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) hydrology protocols provides an excellent way to connect academic learning, scientific inquiry, multiple subjects, and the values requi...

Journal Article

Tread Lightly: The Truth About Science Friction

During a recent unit on characteristics of animals in different environments, “backyard safari” trips around the schoolyard provided opportunities for students to describe ways that animals are adapted to their unique environments. This led to a ...

Journal Article

Methods and Strategies: Being Deliberate About Concept Development

In order to move students’ thinking from the exploration experiences to concept understanding (and thus the ability to then apply that understanding), teachers must deliberately consider students’ misconceptions, the intermediate steps to the acc...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: The Great Fakesperiment

The Great Fakesperiment is based on 10 fictitious experiment examples. These examples included a brief description of what the experiment was about, asked students to identify the independent or dependent variable, and listed possible answers. The ac...

Acquired Book

Chemistry With Charisma – Volume 1 – 24 Lessons That Capture & Keep Attention in the Classroom

How can a whoopee cushion inspire students’ enthusiasm for learning chemistry? With this powerful book, you will learn to use whoopee cushions—and many other fun items—to capture (and keep) attention in your classroom! Meaningful, motivating, a...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Conceptualizing Moon Phases—Helping students learn how to learn

Helping students understand how to learn is an important goal for all subjects and levels of education. While this goal is highly regarded, promoting it is extremely difficult. Many times, we as teachers are consumed with how to better help our stude...

Journal Article

Research and Teaching: Students’ Perceptions of Their Grades Throughout an Introductory Biology Course—Effect of Open-Book Testing

In this study, the authors examined students’ perceptions of their grades throughout an introductory biology course. Since large majorities of students prefer open-book exams (Moore and Jensen 2008); they sought to determine how these exams affect ...

Journal Article

Extracting the Max From a DNA Extraction

Students of all ages get a thrill out of actually seeing clumps or strands of DNA. The Biotechnology/Bioinformatics Discovery! Project, a professional development workshop offered to science teachers, has always included a DNA-extraction activity. Ov...

Journal Article

Society for College Science Teachers: “But, I Thought We Were Colleagues?” Professors Evaluating Professors

Isn’t forcing faculty to serve as evaluators of peers a lot to expect? To assign tenured professors to evaluate their colleagues is also not fair when the work is nerve racking, the time is demanding, and the stakes are high. Faculty evaluations ar...

Journal Article

From Aristotle to Today: Making the History and Nature of Science Relevant

Students connect to science in multiple ways. For some students, learning how real people have developed and defended their scientific ideas makes science relevant and interesting. Tracking the changes in scientific thought over time can be fascinati...

Journal Article

An Undergraduate Journal Club Experience: A Lesson In Critical Thinking

In an effort to better prepare undergraduate students to read and critically evaluate scientific literature, a journal club experience was introduced into a university's bachelor of science curriculum. As a result of this experience, students have be...

Journal Article

Career of the Month: Avalanche Researcher

Many of us enjoy snowboarding, snowshoeing, and other winter sports at the season’s first sign of snow. But what about when a massive amount of snow crashes down the mountain, gains speed and size with every second, buries everything in its path, a...

Journal Article

Green Science: Going locavore—Teaching students about the benefits of food produced locally

A term that is fairly new to the English vernacular is locavore. This term describes anyone who eats food that is grown locally. A locavore diet consists of both perishable and imperishable food that is generally produced within a 100-mile radius of ...

Journal Article

Editor’s Corner: Today’s Polar Science

The Earth’s polar regions once seemed a remote realm, accessible only through the compelling tales of intrepid explorer-scientists. Accounts of these polar explorers have long fascinated our imagination. Today, Earth’s polar regions are perhaps m...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Seeing the world in a garden—Science and art curricula synergy

Duke Farms and Gardens, a 2,700-acre estate in Hillsborough, New Jersey, that includes a large greenhouse, was the site of a middle school field trip that provided the opportunity to highlight overlapping science and visual art curricula goals. Some...

Journal Article

Teaching With Web-Based Videos

Today, the use of web-based videos in science classrooms is becoming more and more commonplace. However, these videos are often fast-paced and information rich—science concepts can be fragmented and embedded within larger cultural issues. This arti...

Journal Article

Editor’s Note: Record Keeping in Science

Records show others what data you have collected and under what conditions. Without records, patterns escape notice. Records also provide accountability and allow someone else to replicate or analyze your methods. Record keeping is fundamental to sci...

Journal Article

Just Like Real Scientists

How do you inspire students to keep records like scientists? Share the primary research of real scientists and explicitly teach students how to keep records—that’s how! Therefore, a group of third-grade students and their teacher studied the work...